I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about pain and suffering and genocide and natural disasters and…God. Without diminishing the pain and horror, and without denying the legitimacy of our incredulity, our anger at God for allowing these things to happen, I do have the strong sense that we humans are awfully short-sighted in our assessment of what God is or is not doing in the world. What truths can we derive from our suffering when it is but a blip of an event in the continuum of history? What do we, with our short lives, know about how these things fit in the great scheme of things?

And what of all the beauty and goodness we see in the world? Should God get any credit for those things? Should the bad things outweigh the good?

Perhaps it is easy for me to say this sitting comfortably in my Poäng chair at home, surrounded by books, family, love, health and…a roof and walls, but there runs inside me a deep vein of hope. There is good in the world and it will prevail. I believe this deeply.

Hope does not do away with the pain and suffering, and neither does it justify or excuse it. Hope does not mean we cannot or do not weep, grieve, shout at God in anger. What hope does is see, if faintly and uncertainly, beyond pain and suffering to the time when, in Julian of Norwich’s wonderful words, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.

Tonight I had Bruce Cockburn’s album You’ve Never Seen Everything playing in the background as I worked. The title track is quite a powerful song. On first listen it comes across as a heavily political song, which is not unusual for Cockburn. It is a dark song, sparse instrumentation, with lyrics spoken in a low, tired, almost pained voice.

The listener is presented with a series of vignettes showing the dark underbelly of the world: viruses, suicide, murder, drug trade, sexual harassment, consumerism, poisoning of women and children, rage, greed, and so on. After a couple of these vignettes, the words, “You’ve never seen everything”. For example:

And a car crashes and burns on an offramp from the Gardiner
Two dogs in the back seat die, and in the front
a man and his mother
Forensics reveals the lady has pitchfork wounds in her chest –
Pitchfork!
And that the same or a similar instrument has been screwed to the dash
to make sure the driver goes too

You’ve never seen everything

The listener is shaken out of his or her stupor: there is so much darkness beyond that comfortable little world you’ve created for yourself, he seems to be saying. You think you get it? You think you understand the world–like watching the nightly news gives you any sense of what’s going on?

For the longest time I would simply skip over the song. It was too dark, too discomforting. And the only reason I did choose to listen to it was to get to the chorus, which is a rich, beautiful melody dropped in the middle of those dark vignettes:

Bad pressure coming down
Tears – what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around

Until tonight I wasn’t sure what to do with that chorus, other than enjoy it as a brief reprieve from the dark images being spoken around it. The song is the shadow, it seemed to me, and the chorus but a thin ribbon of half-light running through it. But suddenly, tonight, perhaps in confirmation of the things I’ve been thinking about hope, I realized what the song is actually saying. It ends with the chorus and repeated mantra:

Bad pressure coming down
Tears – what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around
Never feel the light falling all around

You’ve never seen everything

It’s not the darkness we haven’t seen around us, it’s the light! We think we’ve seen it all when we see the pain and sorrow of the world, but we haven’t seen everything: we haven’t seen the light falling all around, filling all the infinite space in which the ribbon of shadow moves. We choose to ride the ribbon of darkness when we could just as well ride the light if we are willing to see it.

In fact, the album ends quite abruptly a few songs later on the word “hope”.

Watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events the other night. It got mixed reviews from the critics and its domestic (U.S.) gross didn’t make up the film’s production budget. But I enjoyed. Jim Carrey was excellent as Count Olaf. I was worried that he’d play Count Olaf in a too Jim Carrey-ish way, but he did quite well. The humour in the role was more quirky than rubbery, if you know what I mean, and he did well. Quite a dark film—could’ve been directed by Tim Burton (but it wasn’t)—and not sure what to make of the ending, but still…3.5/4

Of course, I’ve always thought Jim Carrey was a fine actor. The Academy has a hard time with crossover actors, at least at first (Tom Hanks has broken that barrier, though). One day Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell will get their due acclaim.

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Looking at some of my site stats, particularly country of origin for hits. Lots of 1 and 2 hit stats from all over the world, which I consider flukes or bots or spam. The number spikes in the UK, but I know I have at least one regular reader there. Canada is the majority source for hits, with the U.S. in distant second. But there is an oddity: a significant number of hits from Switzerland. Enough hits to not be accidental. Who could that be? Swiss reader: show yourself!

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The worst part of writing a sermon? It’s impossible to include everything without taking up an enormous amount of time, turning it into a lecture and losing everyone in the process. I wonder if any sermon ever feels complete to some degree.

3. It’s steeped in memory. As a young boy in Holland I must have seen a episode of the animated Pink Panther at some point, because I remember seeing a number of opening credits when they played the Pink Panther movies (starring Peter Sellers) and getting excited. The opening credits always involved the animated Pink Panther character and the animated Clouseau character in hot pursuit. I loved those opening credits, which included the theme song, because I thought it was an episode of the Pink Panther. But I was always disappointed when the “episode” ended and the live action film began. I appreciate Inspector Clouseau much more now than I did then.

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I anxiously await Phil‘s review of the Bob Dylan concert in Regina. I’ve heard Bob Dylan’s concerts can be quite “tempermental”: sometimes they’re fantastic, sometimes they’re terrible. Here’s a review by my seminary course “instructor”. I take his review as “mixed”—good because it was Dylan, not so good because of poor sound. He links to the setlist, which is largely made up of post-1997 material.

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I’m listening to some music samples on BobDylan.com. Some observations:

1. Why is it that the best artists go through nearly-unlistenable periods in the 1980s? Bob Dylan and Bruce Cockburn both do and it’s a shame. I have a large Bruce Cockburn CD collection, but there is a huge gap in there spanning the late-70s and the 80s. 1978-1986 are nearly unlistenable years musically (although I’m sure he remains lyrically brilliant during that time). And just at the time when Cockburn comes to his musical senses, Dylan dives into his own period of 80s darkness.

Who ever thought that drum machines and synthesizers were a good idea?

2. Bob Dylan’s “born again” albums are fantastic. Shot of Love is a personal favourite and, based on what I’ve heard on the website, I think both Saved and Slow Train Coming are worth purchasing. (I’ve said it before, but I can hardly believe that “Gotta Serve Somebody” won a Grammy for Best Song—not because it’s a poor song, but because it’s so overtly evangelical.)

3. I could use more Bob Dylan. The unfortunate fact of being born in the mid-70s and not getting into Bob Dylan until well into my 20s is that I have a lot of catching up to do.